Synopsis
Ronald Fairbairn's theory of object relations, first published in the 1940's, revolutionized psychoanalysis. Countering Freud's view that the developmental drive emerged almost solely from within an individual, Fairbairn argued that each person's fundamental need for relationships organizes development and its vicissitudes. In the ensuing years, frequently without attribution to Fairbairn, object relations theory became central to psychoanalytic thinking, and a source for modern infant research, relational theory, the study of dissociation and multiple personality, psychoanalytic family therapy, and the techniques of psychoanalytic therapy.
Fairbairn's theory drew on his own wide-ranging experience, unusual for his time, which included degrees both in philosophy and medicine at Edinburgh University, where he later taught philosophy and medical psychology from 1927-1935. His thorough reading of Freud and his clinical experience with abused children, sexual offenders, and war neuroses as well as neurotic adults, provided the basis for reorienting psychoanalysis to the study of relationships.
At the center of Fairbairn's theory is the concept of dynamic internal relations between the self and its objects that give meaning to experience. Fairbairn thought that infants deal with frustration, rejection, and trauma through introjection and splitting of the object. The resulting matrix of dynamic internal relationships, part of every human being's make-up, profoundly influences behavior and interpersonal interactions in the outer world.
Volume I of this two-volume set contains Fairbairn's previously uncollected major papers, which are characterized by flexibility and depth in the application of object relations theory to the clinical situation. The papers on theory and scientific methodology show rigorous logic in the exploration of the scientific underpinnings of psychoanalysis and of the issues posed by the substitution of an object relations view for Freud's classical theory.
Volume II consists of early un
About the Author
David E. Scharff, M.D., is Co-Director of the International Institute of Object Relations Therapy. He is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University and at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, a Teaching Analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, and former Director of the Washington School of Psychiatry. He is author and co-author of seven books and many articles, and maintains a private practice in adult, child, psychoanalysis, couple, and family therapy.
Ellinor Fairbairn Birtles, the daughter of W. R. D.Fairbairn, was born and raised in Edinburgh. She was a medical student at Edinburgh University from 1945-47 and holds a BA in the History of Ideas from Kingston Polytechnic (now Kingston University). Her current doctoral research project in philosophy at Kingston University is entitled "The Origins of Fairbairn's Theory of Object Relations". This volume covers Fairbairn's clinical and theoretical papers published after those collected in Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. Volume II contains his early unpublished papers and lectures prior to Psychoanalytic Studies, as well as his papers published in the 1930s on applied psychoanalysis.
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